When Molly Jong Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir (Viking 2025), I resolved to avoid it. I mean, Erica Jong, author of my liberation, facilitator of my most humorous self-deprecation. I didn’t want to know the sad, selfish underbelly of my hero. Then, one day, I listened to an interview with the author, and I thought, “Well, if I can listen to this book in her voice, maybe I’ll learn something.” I did. I found the audio book narrated by the Jong-Fast herself, and, wow, am I glad I did.
Once I relented, I found myself feeling enormously grateful to Molly Jong-Fast for sharing her mother’s missteps, blunders, neglect, and abuse. It made me more aware of my own mistakes and offered me a sense of what my own children might have felt at times in their childhood.
Erica Jong was nothing like me. She was glamorous, well-connected, and a star with a severe drinking problem. I was and had nothing of the kind. But I am a writer, and I know now that too often in my children’s lifetime I felt I had relinquished my Self on their behalf, and I am sure I unwittingly hurt them in some of the ways this mother hurt this daughter. Erica Jong’s dementia and her singular life view prevent her from understanding what happened to her daughter, but with any luck, I still have some time. To make some repairs. Or at least to let my kids know I care. I am sorry.
At base, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, is an everywoman story. When I wrote my memoir, I struggled with how to depict my mother, who suffered multiple traumas too few years before I was born to have sorted them out; she grew to be the mother everyone wished were theirs, but there was always a regret between us for what we could not have. I realized, as I wrote and forgave us both, that the complexities of the mother/daughter conundrum are much the same for even the happiest of pairs. Each mother, each daughter is a reflection of the other. As my mother’s face becomes more clearly the one I see in the mirror every day, I understand more deeply how normal we actually were.
I am grateful to Molly Jong-Fast for the mirror she held unto my nature in much the same way I remain grateful to Erica Jong for Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing . . . and later for Serenissima and the sensual dive into Jessica Shylock’s world. . . . as well as so many other pages of entertainment and enlightenment.
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir is a lovely — if oftentimes harrowing — read, a book any daughter is liable find herself and her mother in. A terrific experience.
When I moved to New York City in 2003, it took me some time before I eventually found work as a New York City Sightseeing Guide. For the first year, I felt ridiculously fortunate to be able to share NYC with tourists who rode with me on the top of a double-decker bus and to get paid for the pleasure. That wore off eventually, but in the meantime, I got to know Mandy.
Mandy, still generally called by what would become her dead name, Stephen, was my favorite coworker. A brilliant guide and former attorney, she was saving up for gender reassignment surgery.
Divorce from a greedy wife, mental illness in a daughter whom Mandy would never abandon, and frequent mandate transgressions had led to her being fired from her high-powered law firm, which left Mandy with no money for the ultra-expensive procedures. In the interim, Mandy made concessions of powerful self-assertion by wearing, in all weather, Bermuda shorts fashioned in bright orange sweatshirt fabric, frowzy blouses and tops that plunged below her prominent and rapidly graying chest hair, and neon-colored sneakers. Her hair and mouth were a whirling forest of bright tangerine curls and a soft, pillowy hot pink glossy triangle.
“I’m a lesbian,” Mandy explained to me the first time she asked me out to dinner.
I was flattered. I had never met anyone smarter or funnier than this person, qualities I have always found irresistible in a man. But I had no interest in being romantically involved with a woman, even a woman who was, anatomically at least, still a man. Of course, I didn’t want to hurt Mandy’s feelings, and though I turned down the invitations to dinner, to movies, to theater, we often sat together as we waited between buses.
I never tired of listening to the stories she told. The personal stories were harrowing, beginning with a Lower East Side childhood, and the professional stories were infuriating. This person had tolerated more than anyone’s fair share of abuse by the system over the years. If I had been differently wired, if I were capable of loving Mandy as she deserved to be loved, I would have spent all kinds of days and nights with this remarkable human being.
Those first months working on the bus were magical. What a privilege it seemed to explore New York from an ostensible eagle’s view. As a history and culture buff, I was learning in a way no book or school had ever taught me. Mandy’s wide knowledge of the city enriched each day and broadened my tour repertoire. Having studied architecture, Mandy was conversant with the eclectic nuances of building styles that comprised our city’s makeup. As an astute political observer, she understood the underpinnings of Tammany, why Robert Moses was more tyrant than savior. She explained to me why the Breslin-Mailer campaign to create the great city-state, a movement I enthusiastically worked for in my youth, was basically moronic. Having studied labor law, her expertise guided our labor disputes. When the company abused us, Mandy spoke eloquently with great erudition. She knew the score. She understood what we were entitled to and what was being kept from us with malicious, greedy fury.
Winter descended as I rounded the end of my first year on the bus, and with it came the end of the idyll. Cold weather and heartless employers extinguished the joy.
Eventually, Mandy ended too.
Our company, a startup in every sense of the word, provided no bathroom for our relief. For a while, we were allowed to use the restrooms in the Hilton Garden Inn, which was less than a block from our launch site, and the management there even encouraged us to buy goods in their gift store and food mart by giving us a generous discount.
Then one day Mandy farted and sighed loudly in a stall in the women’s room, and a tourist seated next to her, the woman in the next stall, securely separated by a metal wall and a locked door, freaked out at the sound of a male voice sighing on the tail of a roaring fart. She complained to the Hilton management. After that, all guides were banned from the place. No more comfy lounge seats, no more cheap candy bars. No more toilet. I saw no solution to the problem and opted to take a break.
I left the buses to edit a book for the friend of a friend. The book was set in NYC, but the London-based author knew little about our city and wrote locations that were amiss and an Iowa-bred protagonist, who was more accurately an Englishman in New York. To complete the project, I went to the UK for a few months, and when I returned, Mandy was gone.
Conditions Mandy had fought to improve had killed her.
Mandy was our advocate, the voice that argued for improvement in conditions atop the buses that were unfit for guides. We had no place to sit. We were required at times to perform chores – like helping the elderly up the stairs or carrying baby paraphernalia or lugging luggage up the stairs – that put undue strain on all our muscle groups. We stood for long periods of time, jostled mercilessly about. We had no place to go to get warm, no relief from the harsh winter exacerbated by the harsh wind generated by the moving bus.
Mandy’s back and health could not take it. She suffered pneumonia and bronchitis and then was injured and re-injured until she finally had no choice but to undergo back surgery. Like many spinal surgery patients, Mandy did not survive. The company management, who never appreciated what an asset they had in Mandy, was relieved. Tethered by Mandy’s knowledge of the law, they had felt forced to retain her. Her illnesses and back troubles cost them money by way of pay they were impelled to dole out and by insurance rate hikes her claims inflicted. The bloodsuckers were free at last.
We who loved Mandy, lost a precious friend. I lost a valuable mentor.
I find myself wishing for her presence lately. She’d tell me why the current state of affairs for Trans people cannot hold. She’d tell me to keep the faith.
“Don’t give the bastards any power,’ she’d laugh. “They’ll turn to dust just like the rest of us.”
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